Blog: Zubin Mehta, now L.A. Phil conductor emeritus, lets the soul flow out of Brahms

To massively oversimplify, that sensibility is to treat music as something that flows like a river, as does a raga, rather than, say, a frozen symphonic edifice composed of harmonic building blocks. As a conductor, Mehta has always known exactly where he was going. Early on he made a name for himself having memorized scores, such as Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” thought unmemorizable. But it was the journey rather than the whole that characterized his performance. Arrival, which is to say climaxes, have always been, and still are, his specialty. Audiences love him for that. Critics aren’t supposed to.